The Wicket project has released Wicket 1.2. Wicket is a Java component based web application framework licensed under the open source Apache 2 license. Wicket allows Java developers to create highly dynamic web applications using plain Java and HTML. This is the third major release of the Wicket web framework and marks a major milestone after 7 months of hard labor by the core team of developers and the users of the framework. This release has been anticipated for several months and sports many major new features and improvements over previous releases. Major features of Wicket 1.2 include:

• Native, cross-platform AJAX support: use AJAX without having to write a single line of JavaScript. Wicket's AJAX cross-platform capabilities have been rated 'A' (i.e., very much cross-browser) along with some other popular libraries like DOJO
• Render multiple components in one AJAX call, where each component can occupy any part of the page
• Improved markup inheritance: panels, pages, header contributions
• Improved and simplified internationalization (i18n) support, using , better resource bundle lookup strategy
• Out of the box default resource bundles for many languages, including English, German, Spanish, Portugese, French, Hungarian, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Bulgarian and Farzi (Iranian)
• Multiple form component validation, validate two or more fields that are related
• Improved form handling: clear form validation workflow that allows you to define required and type conversion attributes of a form component much easier than in the past
• Nice URL support through URL mounting
• Markup fragments (inline panels)
• Improved performance by replacing OGNL with our own object graph language parser
• Response filter support, added ServerTime and ServerClientTime filters
• Reloading of resource bundles in development mode
• Improved unit test support for your Wicket components and pages through the WicketTester, create unit tests that run outside the container
• Out-of-the-box AJAX components: paging navigator, link with fallback, auto-updater, AJAX form, AJAX submit buttons, etc.
• Improved authorization and authentication support, giving you the power to specify authorization at the component level. An example project featuring a role based, annotation framework is now part of the standard distribution.
• Spring support for injecting your business logic into your web pages and components in a non-intrusive manner, while still being able to use the convenient Wicket idiom for creating pages (using the Java new operator)
• Improved settings system: settings are now partitioned into logical groupings to make them easier to find
• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements

Wicket runs on any application server supporting the servlet API version 2.3 and higher, and will work on Java 1.4 SDK's or newer. We have tried to keep API changes to a minimum, but had to change and remove some methods and classes. Wicket 1.2 will not be a drop-in replacement, though most of your application's pages and components should not be affected. There is a migration guide available on our wiki: Migrating to Wicket 1.2. The Wicket 1.2 release is a highly anticipated major landmark in the history of Wicket. The core development team wishes to extend their gratitude to all users who helped build and test this release. Enjoy and have fun! Message was edited by: joeo at enigmastation dot com (who adds: rumour has it there's a very big company looking into Wicket...)

I reckon we're going to see a raft of MVC frameworks supporting GUI generation using JPA annotations in the coming months, in fact the web beans JSR seems to aim to do exactly that. Do you have any plans to do something similar or do you have an example of creating a GUI for CRUD operations quickly?

Currently we don't have direct support for JPA annotations. Wicket 1.2 is still Java 1.4 compatible. Our next major release will focus on Java 5 specifics, such as generics. Additional out-of-the-box packages for JPA annotations are definitely considered. In an internal project at my company we already used JPA annotations in custom components. Considering that creating your own components is really easy with Wicket, it is not that much work to add JPA support yourself. An example would be to retrieve the max length of a field from the JPA annotation and set that on the textfield's markup. This is typically done using an attribute modifier. The recipe is to create a model that retrieves the value of the length annotation. It would be too much to post it here, but it sure isn't rocket science to work it out. We have several contributed projects that bridge the gap with Hibernate. I haven't worked with those projects myself, but I hear good comments about them (databinder by Nathan Hamblen, and other (unreleased) projects in our Wicket Stuff project). In the mean time, we do have annotations based Spring integration (wicket-spring-annot), and annotations based authorization on a page and even component level (wicket-auth-roles).

Congrats for everyone involved!!!

For those that are interested: IDE support for Wicket is also growing and maturing. Support for both Eclipse and Netbeans is under development. You can find them here: * https://nbwicketsupport.dev.java.net/ * http://www.laughingpanda.org/mediawiki/index.php/Wicket_Bench For the Wicket Bench (the Eclipse plugin) I especially like the rename refactor which keeps all file names in sync. I'm not a netbeans user (yet) and as far as I know, the netbeans support module is not available for download yet. But that should be fixed soon, as it has just been added to java.net

Howdy, I can confirm that one of the largest companies in the e-commerce space is looking at Wicket as an alternative to more traditional frameworks like Struts. Let's say that I'm somewhat involved in the evaluation. If you were at JavaOne and attended Doug Bateman's presentation, please let him know that large companies do look at things like Wicket and plan to deploy them in mission-critical applications... and remind him that he can buy me sushi any time! The candidates being evaluated are: * Wicket * JSF * RIFE So far Wicket seems to edge out the others. We'll see in the coming 45 days how that plays out... perhaps soon I'll be able to confirm that Wicket will be in production. And, if not, I will be happy to discuss why Wicket wasn't chosen. I owe an article to TSS anyway... Cheers, E

Cool. Good luck in the decission making process. Isn't that the fun part of any project? ;) I know of a couple of large systems being/ have been build with Wicket too, but mostly these are not public facing systems. And it's good to see Wicket is seen as a good match for OSGi, judging by the fact that for several of those systems OSGi plays a central role, and from the fact that Wicket is one of the first implementations of the Rich Server Platform – User Interface Framework

Martin, Can you add Wicket 1.2 to the Maven 2 repository? http://www.ibiblio.org/maven2/wicket/wicket/ Sean

Working on it tonight, but it might take a while when the maven committers actually upload it. In the mean time: our own maven repository might help. Note: the sourceforge service for these downloads isn't very reliable, a collegue of mine has had a lot of problems getting them from that location. Your milage may vary.

And the tracker for the upload request can be found here: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MAVENUPLOAD-920

Wicket has come a long way. I was very skeptical to it when I first heard about it at last year's JavaOne but since then many things have changed in Wicket, as well as in my view about it. I have used Wicket on a couple of projects and I must say I am VERY impressed. I think Wicket team is doing an amazing job and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anybody who needs to develop a straightforward, monolithic web-application and wants to easily embrace Ajax. Keep up the good work, you rock!

Wicket is an excellent framework, and represents a huge step toward the kind of simplification we all need. I especially appreciate the Ajax model.